Science, the Endless Frontier at 75

As a pioneer in the nuclear power sector, the United States shaped the international regulatory regime that established norms and agreements to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy. However, US competitiveness… Read More

When Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau took office in 2015 as Canada’s prime minister, a top priority was to establish Canada as a global leader on climate change. At the United Nations’… Read More

Digital companies are in the news a lot these days, and not always for positive reasons. The media reports that Amazon was driven out of New York City; that Facebook paid a… Read More

The sharp deterioration of United States-China relations over the past 18 months has raised a series of new challenges for Chinese scientific development. What started out as trade friction has evolved into… Read More

China is racing to be the first to build and operate 5G infrastructure with a whole-of-government approach encompassing resources and bureaucratic coordination not imaginable in the United States. To facilitate its goals, the Chinese government is aiming to ensure that global standards are compatible with Chinese technology for generations to come.

It is now more than three years since the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released their influential report Gene Drives on the Horizon: Advancing Science, Navigating Uncertainty, and Aligning Research … Read More

Human health and biomedical science have been transformed in tandem over the past two centuries. From around 1850 to 1920, better nutrition and prevention of epidemic infections were the main contributors to… Read More

Recently, a computer-generated work of art titled “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy” was sold by the auction house Christie’s for $350,000 to an anonymous bidder. Purported to be the… Read More

In accepting publication metrics as the lodestar for judging the merits of scientific research, the scientific community willfully cedes a significant degree of its self-governance to a small number of scientific publishing companies that are fundamentally responsive to the interests of corporate shareholders—not to the societies that fund and are promised the benefits of research.

The post-World War II model for organizing science remains powerful, but moving beyond its limits will be necessary for assuring the contributions of science to solving a wide array of societal challenges.